ESR1 will tackle the concept of dissensus from a political science perspective by analysing the recent shift from consensus to dissensus regarding liberal democracy. This individual doctoral project will focus on debates in the European Parliament (EP) when unpacking the conflicting conceptions of democracy and the rule of law promoted since the early 1990s. It will shed new light on power and lines of conflict, be they ideological, partisan, strategic or gendered, and map the actors and their political and social resources involved in these controversies along the different lines of conflict. With a focus on power and ideas, ESR1 will explore conflicting conceptions of democracy and the rule of law promoted by different political groups in the EP since the early 1990s.

The European Parliament is an ideal case to shed light on the divide over the rule of law. As a collective body competing for the embodiment of European democracy, over the past decades, the EP has made the rule of law a central cause. The EP constitutes an excellent empirical field to observe the shift from consensus to dissensus and its effect on the European policy processes.

ESR 1 is expected to contribute to the establishment of a typology of dissensus and to use both qualitative and quantitative research methods, including content analysis of parliamentary debates in the EP as well as network analysis that will map the actors of consensus and dissensus over the rule of law.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the suggested empirical choices.

The ESR2 will tackle the concept of dissensus from a political economy & politics perspective by analysing how the rise of EU economic, fiscal and social governance “from one crisis to another” constitutes a challenge to representative democracy. The empirical focus of the foreseen individual doctoral research will deal with specific forms of sociological, institutional and/or discursive underpinnings of EU economic governance; its aim will be to shed a light on one or several arenas, type(s) of actors (political, administrative, legal, economic, academic etc.) and critical junctures that have shaped the controversies over the EU seen as a locus of power, its institutional structure as well as its distributional effects.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the suggested empirical choices.

ESR3 will approach the concept of dissensus from a legal perspective. This research project will assess how EU law and the European fundamental rights system have been at the forefront of several legal conflicts within Europe regarding liberal democracy.

The Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights, and several national courts have ruled on politically salient issues creating legal narratives on and shaping our understanding of dissensus in Europe. National, European and international legal norms have been relied upon to bring political and legal disputes before courts, who are expected to provide a forum for contestation in a system of liberal democracy and separation of powers. The research project will focus on how these rulings have formalised and legalised disagreements about the meaning of democracy, the rule of law and separation of powers, as well as substantive policies, such as migration, climate change, or gender-related issues. It may also engage with different ways of circumventing dissensus and upholding regional rule of law and human rights standards in the face of national challenges.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the two or three regulatory areas selected.

ESR4 will approach the concept of dissensus from an International Relations perspective. This IRP will shed new light on the global dimension of the dissensus and what it means for the EU’s position on the global stage, its geopolitical calculations and foreign policy practices. It will seek to systematically scrutinise the nature of the dissensus facing the EU’s external agenda. It will describe how alternative framings of good governance, the rule of law and individual rights championed by emerging authoritarian centres of gravity have altered EU foreign & diplomatic action.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, and a methodological strategy

ESR5 will focus on legal actors. This IRP will investigate judicial institutions in Europe and their role in the protection of fundamental rights, analysing the emerging trends of cooperation and conflict between national courts and European courts, including the reference made to the protection of the "constitutional identity" of Member States. It aims to show whether the courts in Europe have adopted a common understanding of the rule of law in relation to the protection of constitutional rights or whether they opted to highlight elements of dissensus - e.g., regarding gender-related issues. It also aims to investigate and analyse conflicts between domestic and EU law, and the role of courts in ensuring their resolution and the respect for the principle of primacy of EU law over national law in cases related to the rule of law and fundamental rights.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the empirical choices envisioned.

ESR6 will focus on societal mobilisation networks (at urban, regional, national or supranational level). This IRP will explore how EU instruments have impacted social mobilisation contesting institutions, norms, values and practices associated with liberal democracy. Political mobilisation networks are also involved in challenging liberal principles, such as the separation of powers or LGBTIQ+ rights. They have even at times formally supported the principles of the rule of law and democracy but championed practices that contradict these same principles. This IRP will explore how such ambiguous realities have affected the EU’s continued commitment to include societal forces in its efforts at democratic consolidation.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the suggested empirical choices.

ESR7 will focus on political actors. This IRP will examine how populist radical right parties across Europe are challenging liberal democratic institutions. It aims to uncover how the model of ‘illiberal’ democracy is being spread amongst these parties in Europe, with a specific focus on the role of cooperation between these parties. Empirically, the focus will be on the European Parliament and (online and offline) transnational networks.

Candidates should:

• Have a strong research background (research master’s degree or equivalent training)
• Have experience with executing research with the following methods of data collection and analysis: content analysis (qualitative and/or quantitative) and in-depth elite interviews
• Be proficient in at least two European languages, including English, in order to successfully employ these methods of data collection and analysis
• Be familiar with the literature on populist radical right parties

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the suggested empirical choices.

ESR8 will focus on technocratic actors. This IRP will explore the EU as an external policy actor functioning as a ‘teacher’ of the rule of law at the international level and the capacity of its instruments to respond to mounting local dissensus in target countries. It will explore such instruments as technical assistance, capacity-building and other socialisation pathways to promoting the rule of law mobilised by the EU. It will do this across two or three different regulatory areas (for example environment, finance, human rights, trade, labor right, intellectual property, etc.) where the EU acts as a relevant international actor on the world stage. The IRP will involve a comparative analysis seeking to flesh out the general modalities, conditions and practices of the export of concepts and practices of rule of law.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the two or three regulatory areas selected.

ESR9 will focus on contested governance practices championed by the EU. This IRP will analyse the EU’s role in, and response to, transnational campaigns centring on global governance challenges where national sovereignty is a key issue. It will focus on environmental governance and in particular deforestation. The IRP will analyze the policy-making process in Brussels on this issue, including the potential influence of civil society organizations, as well as the interactions with stakeholders in producer countries.  It will unpack the impact of the policy contested instruments available to the EU to advance its goals in its own external action. The empirical case study associated with this IRP is EU external action efforts in the fight against deforestation.

Fighting deforestation has quickly risen towards the top of the EU’s external action agenda. Not only is deforestation a major source of environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions, but it also contributes in many countries to rampant illegality and violations of indigenous community rights. Yet multilateral institutions for forest governance such as the UN Forum on Forests remain extremely weak, while global efforts to prevent deforestation, e.g. through the UNFCCC process and the Paris Agreement, are hotly contested by resurgent claims to national resource sovereignty, of which the Bolsonaro government in Brazil is a prominent example.  Spearheaded by transnational civil society organizations and advocacy networks spanning developed and developing countries, multinational corporations and national governments, including a number of EU member states, have made high-profile voluntary commitments to fight tropical deforestation and reduce its impact on their supply chains, but with limited effects to date.  In response, the European Commission has recently proposed a path-breaking new regulation which prohibits businesses from placing agricultural products derived from deforested land on the EU market and requires them to demonstrate due diligence that they have mitigated the risks of doing so, subject to stringent penalties.

The proposed PhD project will analyze the EU’s role in the transnational campaign against deforestation and the policy instruments available to the Union to advance this goal through its own external action. Key instruments to be examined include unilateral measures, such as restrictions on deforestation-related products entering the EU market and due diligence requirements for importers of agricultural forest-risk commodities. They likewise include bilateral and plurilateral measures, such as partnership and trade agreements with producer countries, as well as cooperation with other consumer countries.  The research will also examine the responses of producer country governments, business, and civil society organizations to EU measures that may be perceived as challenging national sovereignty over natural resources and development strategies.  Depending on the PhD researcher’s specific interests and expertise, the project could include a comparative analysis of major regional/sectoral cases, such as palm oil in Indonesia and Malaysia; cocoa in Ghana and Ivory Coast; or beef and soy in Brazil.  Addressing a crucial contemporary policy challenge, this project will shed valuable light on the EU’s capacities to promote its core norms and values, such as environmental sustainability, the rule of law, and fundamental rights, in an age of contested multilateralism and resurgent national sovereignty.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the two or three regulatory areas selected.

ESR10 will focus on parliamentary contestation. This IRP will scrutinise how contestation can affect the EU’s ability to conclude comprehensive trade agreements. It will focus on the socio-economic and intersectional concerns raised during the European and Canadian democratic processes involved in the ratification, entry into force and implementation of the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). The Researcher will assess how differences in the understanding of liberal democracy between the EU and Canada, between EU MS and within several EU MS paved the way to democratic conflicts within the parliaments and the legal systems involved.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the two or three regulatory areas selected.

ESR11 will focus on legal contestation. This IRP will analyse how contestation surrounding the understanding and practice of the rule of law has impacted EU cooperation in criminal matters with third partners. The Researcher will explore the specific case of international judicial cooperation in criminal matters between the EU and Latin America. The IRP will include a comparative legal study of the understandings of the rule of law within the EU and MERCOSUR. The purpose of this is to examine whether the degree of cooperation in criminal matters with third partners is subordinated to common values and shared intersectional concerns.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the two or three regulatory areas selected.

ESR12 will focus on practices which sustain the EU’s border regimes with third countries in the Mediterranean, including ‘compacts’, partnerships, and bilateral agreements. The ESR will examine how such practices (that comprise forms of detention, deportation, and pushbacks, as well as the use of surveillance technology) contest the EU’s liberal values and norms.

Successful candidates can design a project of their own choosing focusing on new and on-going forms of externalisation of the EU’s and Member States’ border and migration policies in the Mediterranean and wider MENA region. Possible topics can include, though are not limited to migration and mobility partnerships, EU-wide as well as bilateral; practices which sustain border regimes; the role of NGOs, IOs or courts; datafication and digitalisation of migration governance; the contestation of these practices, including by migrants and from an intersectional perspective.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the two or three regulatory areas selected.

ESR13 will analyse the impact of geopolitical competition on EU democracy and resilience promotion instruments in third countries. This IRP will assess whether the EU’s current models, instruments and capabilities for mediation, crisis management and peace support enable it to engage as an effective actor in areas of intersectional conflicts. It will assess whether EU instruments contribute to a liberal peace model able to resolve crises despite competition from illiberal actors.

A PhD empirically dedicated to the Ukrainian case would be most welcome. Against the backdrop of Ukraine’s invasion by Russia in February 2022, we emphasize the emergency of having PhD projects addressing the relevancy and impact of the EU peace support and stability instruments and mechanisms at play in Ukraine and the wider eastern European region.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the suggested empirical choices.

ESR14 will analyse the impact of focus on institutional competition at the regional level. This IRP will compare the strategic and institutional resources mobilised by two civilian powers - the EU and Japan – to mediate mounting intersectional crises and counter shifts towards authoritarianism within their respective regions. The IRP will compare how such crises and shifts have reshaped the EU and Japan’s strategies of democratic support in their respective neighbourhoods, namely the area covered by the European Neighbourhood Policy for the EU and the South-East Asia for Japan.

The specific research objective(s) of the PhD is to analyse in a comparative perspective the reaction of the EU and Japan against rising autocratization in the neighbouring countries. Recently, authoritarian turns have been recorded on a global scale in different regions, bringing the processes of autocratization in the post-cold war period at the centre of the current academic debate. However, the strategies and policies to counter these processes of autocratization have been understudied and neglected so far by the mainstream literature.

The ESR project’s central research question is: how have authoritarian turns in the neighbouring countries reshaped EU and Japan’s strategy of democracy support and regional political dynamics?

This ESR project relates to the central research question of the GEM-Diamond Project in so far as it covers the political axe of the project focusing on the reaction to exogenous competing and alternative models to democracy. In line with the project overall, the methods deployed during the research are qualitative in nature, including content analysis and elite interviews.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the two or three regulatory areas selected.

ESR15 will assess the effectiveness of the EU’s instruments to promote democracy within the context of the EU’s enlargement and European Neighbourhood policies. The main starting assumption of the ESR15 is that diverging political values, foreign policy approaches and alternative governance models championed by autocratic regimes around the EU affect the EU’s ability to engage with its neighbors. Based on this assumption, this IRP will explore how and to what extent competing power centres around the EU, which contest EU norms have constrained or altered the main tools used in the EU’s external policies in relation to its neighbourhood. Neighborhood is defined broadly to include both the candidate countries and those that are part of the formal neighborhood agenda, which include the Eastern and Southern neighborhoods.

More specifically, the research objective of the PhD project will be to analyse how the growing contestation surrounding democracy, the rule of law and foreign policy norms (international law and multilateralism) affects EU’s toolbox to promote pro-democracy and/or foreign policy principles, and in particular its political conditionality. The project is expected to study the EU’s foreign policy by focusing on the impact of autocratisation processes around the EU on the EU’s instrument of conditionality vis-à-vis third states. Hence, the focus is expected to be on the authoritarian tendencies in the EU’s neighborhood and the challenges these tendencies pose not only to the EU’s norm promotion efforts, but also to its normative power claims. Therefore, the research project is expected to also address how these various forms of domestic norm contestation in the neighborhood affect the EU’s role as an international actor and its foreign policy identity.

This doctoral project could employ qualitative and/or quantitative methods. Comparative research designs are encouraged to observe and assess the variation in EU’s relationship with different neighborhood regions or within the same country over time.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the suggested empirical choices.

ESR16 will focus on legal constitutional contestation. This IRP will analyse how contestation surrounding the principle of primacy impacts the “constitutional model” of EU law.

In 2005, EU failed to adopt a Constitutional Treaty that would have had important consequences as regard the consolidation of the structure of EU Law. Despite this failure, the Lisbon Treaty (2007) introduces many improvements in the primary law of the EU, among other by eliminating the dual structure of EC/EU. Thus, the EU, which “replace and succeed the European Community (TEU, art. 1 al. 3).  One of the strong constitutional elements of the inherited EU legal order is the principle of primacy of EU law. However, this principle appears nowhere in the Treaties. It was developed by the ECJ through its early case-law, as is recalled in Declaration 17 appended to the Lisbon Treaty.

Interestingly, the principle of primacy didn’t emerge from the case-law based on infringement procedures, but through a subtle reasoning of the Court within the framework of preliminary ruling procedures (Costa, 1963). It is phrased as such: EU law “could not, because of its special and original nature, be overridden by domestic legal provisions, however framed, without being deprived of its character as Community law and without the legal basis of the Community itself being called into question.” As can be seen, it is not a hierarchically implementable conception of primacy, but a bottom-up judicial process based on voluntary abstention by national judges to implement any domestic legislation in violation of EU Law (as confirmed in the 1978 Simmenthal case). Despite being very original and very fragile, this structural feature of EU law has been accepted and effective since almost 60 years. However, since 2020, several challenges to this principle and its functioning have been initiated by national Constitutional Courts, mainly in Germany and Poland.

Can these judicial challenges to the principle of primacy of EU law be considered as a constitutional counter-revolution? Or will the ongoing judicial battle end-up in strengthening EU law? That will be the task of the PhD candidate to investigate further developments in these ongoing matters and to analyse their impact and meaning on the concept of a constitutionalization of EU law.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the suggested empirical choices.